The song was at an end. The company applauded and asked for more. George played Else's accompaniment to some other songs by Schumann, by Brahms; and finally, by general request, two of his own, which had become distasteful to him personally, since somebody or other had suggested that they were reminiscent of Mendelssohn.
While he was accompanying he felt that he was losing all touch with Else and therefore made a special effort in his playing to win back again her sense of sympathy. He played with exaggerated sensibility, he specifically wooed her and felt that it was in vain. For the first time in his life he was her unhappy lover.
The applause after George's songs was great.
"That was your best period," said Else gently to him while she put the music away, "two or three years ago."
The others made kind remarks to him without going into distinctions about the periods of his artistic development.
Nürnberger declared that he had been most agreeably disillusioned by George's songs. "I will not conceal the fact from you," he remarked, "that going by the views I have frequently heard you express, my dear Baron, I should have imagined them considerably less intelligible."
"Quite charming, really," said Wilt, "all so simple and melodious without bombast or affectation."
"And he is the man," thought George grimly, "who dubbed me a dilettante."
Willy came up to him. "Now you just say, Herr Hofrat, that you can manage to whistle them, and if I know anything about physiognomy the Baron will send two gentlemen to see you in the morning."
"Oh no," said George, pulling himself together and smiling; "fortunately, the songs were written in a period which I have long since got over, so I don't feel wounded by any blame or by any praise."
A servant brought in ices, the groups broke up and Anna stood alone with George by the pianoforte.
He asked her quickly "What does it really mean?"
"I don't know," she replied, and looked at him in astonishment.
"Do you feel quite all right now?"
"Absolutely," she answered.
"And is to-day the first time you have had anything like it?" asked George, somewhat hesitatingly.
She answered: "I had something like it yesterday evening at home. It was a kind of faintness. It lasted some time longer, while we were sitting at supper, but nobody noticed it."
"But why did you tell me nothing about it?"
She shrugged her shoulders lightly.
"I say, Anna dear," he said, and smiled guiltily, "I would like to have a word with you at any rate. Give me a signal when you want to go away. I will clear out a few minutes before you, and will wait by the Schwarzenbergplatz till you come along in a fly. I'll get in and we will go for a little drive. Does that suit you?"
She nodded.
He said: "Good-bye, darling," and went into the smoking-room.
Old Ehrenberg, Nürnberger and Wilt had sat down at a green card-table to play tarok. Old Eissler and his son were sitting opposite each other in two enormous green leather arm-chairs and were utilising the opportunity to have a good chat with one another after all this time. George took a cigarette out of a box, lighted it and looked at the pictures on the wall with particular interest. He saw Willy's name written in pale red letters down below in the corner on the green field in a water-colour painted in the grotesque style, that represented a hurdle race ridden by gentlemen in red hunting-coats. He turned involuntarily to the young man and said: "I never knew that one before."
"It is fairly new," remarked Willy lightly.
"Smart picture, eh?" said old Eissler.
"Oh, something more than that," replied George.
"Yes, I hope to be able to look forward to doing something better than that," said Willy.
"He is going to Africa, lion hunting," explained old Eissler, "with Prince Wangenheim. Felician is also supposed to be of the party, but he has not yet decided."
"Why not?" asked Willy.
"He wants to pass his diplomatic examination in the spring."
"But that could be put off," said Willy; "lions are dying out, but unfortunately one can't say the same thing of professors."
"Book me for a picture, Willy," called out Ehrenberg from the card-table.
"You play the Mæcenas later on, father Ehrenberg?" said Willy. "As I've said, I'll take you two on."[1]
"Raise you," replied Ehrenberg, and continued: "If I can order anything for myself, Willy, please paint me a desert landscape showing Prince Wangenheim being gobbled up by the lions ... but as realistic as possible."
"You are making a mistake about the person, Herr Ehrenberg," said Willy; "the celebrated Anti-Semite you are referring to is the cousin of my Wangenheim."
"For all I care," replied Ehrenberg, "the lions, too, may be making a mistake. Every Anti-Semite, you know, isn't bound to be celebrated."
"You will ruin the party if you don't look out," admonished Nürnberger.
"You should have bought an estate and settled in Palestine," said Hofrat Wilt.
"God save me from that," replied Ehrenberg.
"Well, since he has done that in everything up to the present," said Nürnberger, and put down his hand.
"It seems to me, Nürnberger, that you are reproaching me again for not goin' about peddlin' ole clo'."
"Then you would certainly have the right to complain of Anti-Semitism," said Nürnberger, "for who feels anything of it in Austria except the peddlars ... only they, one might almost say."
"And some people with a sense of self-respect," retorted Ehrenberg. "Twenty-seven ... thirty-one ... thirty-eight.... Well, who's won the game?"
Willy had gone back into the drawing-room again. George sat smoking on the arm of an easy-chair. He suddenly noticed old Eissler's look directed towards him in a strange benevolent manner and felt himself reminded of something without knowing what.
"I had a few words the other day," said the old gentleman, "with your brother Felician at Schönstein's; it is striking how you resemble your poor father, especially to one like me, who knew your father as a young man."
It flashed across George at once what old Eissler's look reminded him of. Old Doctor Stauber's eyes had rested on him at Rosner's with the same fatherly expression.
"These old Jews!" he thought sarcastically, but in a remote corner of his soul he felt somewhat moved. It came into his mind that his father had often gone for morning walks in the Prater with Eissler, for whose knowledge of art he had had a great respect. Old Eissler went on speaking.
"You, George, take after your mother more, I think."
"Many say so. It is very hard to judge, oneself."
"They say your mother had such a beautiful voice."
"Yes, in her early youth. I myself never really heard her sing. Of course she tried now and again. Two or three years before her death a doctor in Meran even advised her to practise singing. The idea was that it should be a good exercise for her lungs, but unfortunately it wasn't much of a success."
Old Eissler nodded and looked in front of him. "I suppose you probably won't be able to remember that my poor wife was in Meran at the same time as your late mother?"
George racked his memory. It had escaped him.
"I once travelled in the same compartment as your father," said old Eissler, "at night time. We were both unable to sleep. He told me a great deal about you two—you and Felician I mean."
"Really...."
"For instance, that when you were a boy you had played one of your own compositions to some Italianvirtuoso, and that he had foretold a great future for you."
"Great future.... Great heavens, but it wasn't a virtuoso, Herr Eissler. It was a clergyman, from whom, as a matter of fact, I learned to play the organ."
Eissler continued: "And in the evening, when your mother had gone to bed, you would often improvise for hours on end in the room."
George nodded and sighed quietly. It seemed as though he had had much more talent at that time. "Work!" he thought ardently, "work!..."
He looked up again. "Yes," he said humorously, "that is always the trouble, infant prodigies so seldom come to anything."
"I hear you want to be a conductor, Baron."
"Yes," replied George resolutely, "I am going to Germany next autumn. Perhaps as an accompanist first in the municipal theatre of some little town, just as it comes along."
"But you would not have any objection to a Court theatre?"
"Of course not. What makes you say that, Herr Eissler? if it is not a rude question."
"I know quite well," said Eissler with a smile, as he dropped his monocle, "that you have not sought out my help, but I can quite appreciate on the other hand that you would not mind perhaps being able to get on without the intermediaryship of agents and others of that kind.... I don't mean because of the commissions."
George remained cold. "When one has once decided to take up a theatrical career one knows at the same time all that one's bargaining for."
"Do you know Count Malnitz by any chance?" inquired Eissler, quite unconcerned by George's air of worldly wisdom.
"Malnitz! Do you mean Count Eberhard Malnitz, who had a suite performed a few years ago?"
"Yes, I mean him."
"I don't know him personally, and as for the suite...."
With a wave of the hand Eissler dismissed the composer Malnitz. "He has been manager at Detmold since the beginning of this season," he then said. "That is why I asked you if you knew him. He is a great friend of mine of long standing. He used to live in Vienna. For the last ten or twelve years we have been meeting every year in Carlsbad or Ischl. This year we want to make a little Mediterranean trip at Easter. Will you allow me, my dear Baron, to take an opportunity of mentioning your name to him, and telling him something about your plans to be a conductor?"
George hesitated to answer, and smiled politely.
"Oh please don't regard my suggestion as officious, my dear Baron. If you don't wish it, of course I will sit tight."
"You misunderstand my silence," replied George amiably, but not withouthauteur; "but I really don't know...."
"I think a little Court theatre like that," continued Eissler, "is just the right place for you for the beginning. The fact of your belonging to the nobility won't hurt you at all, not even with my friend Malnitz, however much he likes to play the democrat, or even at times the anarchist ... with the exception of bombs, of course; but he is a charming man and really awfully musical.... Even though he isn't exactly a composer."
"Well," replied George, somewhat embarrassed, "if you would have the kindness to speak to him.... I can't afford to let any chance slip. At any rate, I thank you very much."
"Not at all, I don't guarantee success, it is just a chance, like any other."
Frau Oberberger and Sissy came in, escorted by Demeter.
"What interesting conversation are we interrupting?" said Frau Oberberger. "The experienced platonic lover and the inexperienced rake? One should really have been there."
"Don't upset yourself, Katerina," said Eissler, and his voice had again its deep vibrating ring. "One sometimes talks about other things, such as the future of the human race."
Sissy put a cigarette between her lips, allowed George to give her a light and sat down in the corner of the green leather sofa. "You are not bothering about me at all to-day," she began with that English accent of hers which George liked so well. "As though I positively didn't exist. Yes, that's what it is. I am really a more constant nature than you are, am I not?"
"You constant, Sissy?"... He pushed an arm-chair quite near to her. They spoke of the past summer and the one that was coming.
"Last year," said Sissy, "you gave me your word you would come wherever I was, and you didn't do it. This year you must keep your word."
"Are you going into the Isle of Wight again?"
"No, I am going into the mountains this time, to the Tyrol or the Salzkammergut. I will let you know soon. Will you come?"
"But you are bound to have a large following anywhere."
"I won't trouble about any one except you, George."
"Even supposing Willy Eissler happens to stay in your vicinity?"
"Oh," she said, with a wanton smile and put out her cigarette by pressing it violently upon the glass ash-tray.
They went on talking. It was just like one of those conversations they had had so often during the last few years. It began lightly and flippantly, and eventually finished in a blaze of tender lies which were true for just one moment. George was once again fascinated by Sissy.
"I would really prefer to go travelling with you," he whispered quite near her.
She just nodded. Her left arm rested on the broad back of the ottoman. "If one could only do as one wanted," she said, with a look that dreamt of a hundred men.
He bent down over her trembling arm, went on speaking and became intoxicated with his own words. "Somewhere where nobody knows us, where nobody bothers about any one, that is where I should like to be with you, Sissy, many days and nights."
Sissy shuddered. The word "nights" made her shudder with fear.
Anna appeared in the doorway, signalled to George with a look and then disappeared again. He felt an inward sense of reluctance, and yet he felt that this was just the psychological moment to leave Sissy.
In the doorway of the drawing-room he met Heinrich, who accosted him. "If you are going you might tell me, I should like to speak to you."
"Delighted! But I must ... promised to see Fräulein Rosner home, you see. I'll come straight to the café, so till then...."
A few minutes later he was standing on the Schwarzenberg bridge. The sky was full of stars, the streets stretched out wide and silent. George turned up his coat collar, although it was no longer cold, and walked up and down. Will anything come of the Detmold business? he thought. Oh well, if it is not in Detmold it will be in some town or other. At any rate I mean real business now, and a great deal, a great deal will then lie behind me.
He tried to consider the matter quietly. How will it all turn out? We are now at the end of December. We must go away in March—at the latest. We shall be taken for a honeymoon couple. I shall go walking with her arm-in-arm in Rome and Posilippo, in Venice.... There are women who grow very ugly in that condition ... but not she, no, not she.... There was always a certain touch of the mother in her appearance.... She must stay the summer in some quiet neighbourhood where no one knows her ... in the Thuringian Forest perhaps, or by the Rhine.... How strangely she said that to-day. The house in which the child will come into the world is already in existence. Yes.... Somewhere in the distance, or perhaps quite near here, that house is standing.... And people are living there whom we have never seen. How strange.... When will it come into the world? At the end of the summer, about the beginning of September. By that time, too, I am bound to have gone away. How shall I manage it?... And a year from to-day the little creature will be already four months old. It will grow up ... become big. There will be a young man there one fine day, my son, or a young girl; a beautiful little girl of seven, my daughter.... I shall be forty-four then.... When I am sixty-four I can be a grandfather ... perhaps a director of an opera or two and a celebrated composer in spite of Else's prophecies; but one has got to work for that, that is quite true. More than I have done so far. Else is right, I let myself go too much, I must be different ... I shall too. I feel a change taking place within me. Yes, something new is taking place within me also.
A fly came out of the Heugasse, some one bent out of the window. George recognised Anna's face under the white shawl. He was very glad, got in and kissed her hand. They enjoyed their talk, joked a little about the party from which she had just come and found it really ridiculous to spend an evening in so inept a fashion. He held her hands in his and was affected by her presence. He got out in front of her house and rung. He then came to the open door of the carriage and they arranged an appointment for the following day.
"I think we have got a lot to talk about," said Anna.
He simply nodded. The door of the house was open. She got out of the fly, gave George a long look full of emotion and disappeared into the hall.
My love! thought George, with a feeling of happiness and pride. Life lay before him like something serious and mysterious, full of gifts and full of miracles.
When he went into the café, Heinrich was sitting in a window niche. Next to him was a pale young beardless man whom George had casually spoken to several times, in a dinner-jacket with a velvet collar but with a shirt-front of doubtful cleanliness.
When George came in the young man looked up with ardent eyes from a paper that he was holding in his restless and not very well-kept hands.
"Am I disturbing you?" said George.
"Oh, not a bit of it," replied the young man, with a crazy laugh, "the larger the audience the better."
"Herr Winternitz," explained Heinrich, as he shook hands with George, "was just reading me a series of his poems, but we will break off now." Slightly touched by the disappointed expression of the young man George assured him that he would be delighted to hear the poems if he might be permitted to do so.
"It won't last much longer," explained Winternitz gratefully. "It is only a pity that you missed the beginning. I could——"
"What! Does it all hang together?" said Heinrich in astonishment.
"What, didn't you notice?" exclaimed Winternitz, and laughed again crazily.
"I see," said Heinrich. "So it's always the same woman character whom your poems deal with. I thought it was always a different one."
"Of course it is always the same one, but her special characteristic is that she always seems to be a fresh person."
Herr Winternitz read softly but insistently, as though inwardly consumed. It appeared from his series that he had been loved as never a man had been loved before, but also deceived as never a man had been deceived before, a circumstance which was to be attributed to certain metaphysical causes and not at all to any deficiencies in his own personality. He showed himself, however, in his last poem completely freed of his passion, and declared that he was now ready to enjoy all the pleasures, which the world could offer him. This poem had four stanzas; the last verse of every stanza began with a "hei," and it concluded with the exclamation: "Hei, so career I through the world."
George could not help recognising that the recitation had to a certain extent impressed him, and when Winternitz put the book down and looked around him with dilated pupils, George nodded appreciatively and said: "Very beautiful!"
Winternitz looked expectantly at Heinrich, who was silent for a few seconds and finally remarked: "It is fairly interesting on the whole ... but why do you say 'hei,' if it isn't a rude question? Positively, no one will believe it."
"What do you mean?" exclaimed Winternitz.
"Rather ask your own conscience, if you honestly mean that 'hei.' I believe all the rest which you read to me, I mean I believe it in the highest sense of the term, although not a single word is true. I believe you when you tell me that you have been seducing a girl of fifteen, that you have been behaving like a hardened Don Juan, that you have been corrupting the poor creature in the most dreadful way. That she deceived you with ... what was it now?..."
"A clown, of course," exclaimed Winternitz, with a mad laugh.
"That a clown was the man she deceived you with, that on account of that creature you had adventures which grew more and more sinister, that you wanted to kill your mistress and yourself as well, and that finally you get fed up with the whole business and go travelling about the world, or even careering as far as Australia for all I care: yes, I can believe all that, but that you are the kind of man to cry out 'hei,' that, my dear Winternitz, is a rank swindle."
Winternitz defended himself. He swore that this 'hei' had come from his most inward being, or at any rate from a certain element in his most inward being. When Heinrich made further objections, he gradually became more and more reserved, and finally declared that some time or other he hoped to win his way to that inward freedom where he would be allowed to cry out "hei."
"That time will never come," replied Heinrich positively. "You may perhaps get some time to the epic or the dramatic 'hei,' but the lyrical or subjective 'hei' will remain, my dear Winternitz, a closed book to people like you and me for all eternity."
Winternitz promised to alter the last poem, to make a point of continuing his development and to work at his inward purification.
He stood up, a proceeding which caused his starched shirt front to crack and a stud to break, held out his somewhat clammy hand to Heinrich and George, and went off to the literary men's table at the back.
George expressed discreet appreciation of the poems which he had heard.
"I like him the best of the whole set, at any rate personally," said Heinrich. "He at least has the good sense to maintain with me a certain mutual reserve in really intimate matters. Yes, you need not look at me again as though you were catching me in an attack of megalomania, but I can assure you, George, I have had nearly enough of the sort of people" (he swept the further table with a cursory glance) "who have always got an 'ä soi' on their lips."
"What is always on their lips?"
Heinrich smiled. "You must know the story of the Polish Jew who was sitting in a railway compartment with an unknown man and behaved very conventionally—until he realised by some remark of the other's that he was a Jew too, and on the strength of it immediately proceeded to stretch out his legs on the seat opposite with an 'ä soi' of relief."
"Quite good," said George.
"It is more than that," explained Heinrich sternly, "it is deep; like so many other Jewish stories it gives a bird's-eye view into the tragi-comedy of present-day Judaism. It expresses the eternal truth that no Jew has any real respect for his fellow Jew, never. As little as prisoners in a hostile country have any real respect for each other, particularly when they are hopeless. Envy, hate, yes frequently, admiration, even love; all that there can be between them, but never respect, for the play of all their emotional life takes place in an atmosphere of familiarity, so to speak, in which respect cannot help being stifled."
"Do you know what I think?" remarked George. "That you are a more bitter Anti-Semite than most of the Christians I know."
"Do you think so?" he laughed; "but not a real one. Only the man who is really angry at the bottom of his heart at the Jews' good qualities and does everything he can to bring about the further development of their bad ones is a real Anti-Semite. But you are right up to a certain point, but I must finish by confessing that I am also an Anti-Aryan. Every race as such is naturally repulsive, only the individual manages at times to reconcile himself to the repulsive elements in his race by reason of his own personal qualities. But I will not deny that I am particularly sensitive to the faults of Jews. Probably the only reason is that I, like all others—we Jews, I mean—have been systematically educated up to this sensitiveness. We have been egged on from our youth to look upon Jewish peculiarities as particularly grotesque or repulsive, though we have not been so with regard to the equally grotesque and repulsive peculiarities of other people. I will not disguise it—if a Jew shows bad form in my presence, or behaves in a ridiculous manner, I have often so painful a sensation that I should like to sink into the earth. It is like a kind of shame that perhaps is akin to the shame of a brother who sees his sister undressing. Perhaps the whole thing is egoism too. One gets embittered at being always made responsible for other people's faults, and always being made to pay the penalty for every crime, for every lapse from good taste, for every indiscretion for which every Jew is responsible throughout the whole world. That of course easily makes one unjust, but those are touches of nervousness and sensitiveness, nothing more. Then one pulls oneself together again. That cannot be called Anti-Semitism. But there are Jews whom I really hate, hate as Jews. Those are the people who act before others, and often before themselves, as though they did not belong to the rest at all. The men who try to offer themselves to their enemies and despisers in the most cowardly and cringing fashion, and think that in that way they can escape from the eternal curse whose burden is upon them, or from what they feel is equivalent to a curse. There are of course always Jews like that who go about with the consciousness of their extreme personal meanness, and consequently, consciously or unconsciously, would like to make their race responsible. Of course that does not help them the least bit. What has ever helped the Jews? the good ones and the bad ones. I mean, of course," he hastily added, "those who need something in the way of material or moral help." And then he broke off in a deliberately flippant tone: "Yes, my dear George, the situation is somewhat complicated and it is quite natural that every one who is not directly concerned with the question should not be able to understand it properly."
"No, you really should not...."
Heinrich interrupted him quickly. "Yes, I should, my dear George, that is just how it is. You don't understand us, you see. Many perhaps get an inkling, but understand? no. At any rate we understand you much better than you do us. Although you shake your head! Do we not deserve to? We have found it more necessary, you see, to learn to understand you than you did to learn to understand us. This gift of understanding was forced to develop itself in the course of time ... according to the laws of the struggle for existence if you like. Just consider, if one is going to find one's way about in a foreign country, or, as I said before, in an enemy's country, to be ready for all the dangers and ambushes which lurk there, it is obvious that the primary essential is to get to know one's enemies as well as possible—both their good qualities and their bad."
"So you live among enemies? Among foreigners! You would not admit as much to Leo Golowski. I don't agree with him either, not a bit of it. But how strangely inconsistent you are when you——"
Heinrich interrupted him, genuinely pained. "I have already told you the problem is far too complicated to be really solved. To find a subjective solution is almost impossible. A verbal solution even more so. Why, at times one might believe that things are not so bad. Sometimes one really is at home in spite of everything, feels one is as much at home here—yes, even more at home—than any of your so-called natives can ever feel. It is quite clear that the feeling of strangeness is to some extent cured by the consciousness of understanding. Why, it becomes, as it were, steeped in pride, condescension, tenderness; becomes dissolved—sometimes, of course, in sentimentalism, which is again a bad business."
He sat there with deep furrows in his forehead and looked in front of him.
"Does he really understand me better?" thought George, "than I do him, or is it simply another piece of megalomania...?"
Heinrich suddenly started as though emerging from a dream. He looked at his watch. "Half-past two! And my train goes at eight to-morrow."
"What, you are going away?"
"Yes, that is what I wanted to speak to you about so much. I shall have to say goodbye to you for a goodish time, I'm sorry to say. I am going to Prague. I am taking my father away, out of the asylum home to our own house."
"Is he better, then?"
"No, but he is in that stage when he is not dangerous to those near him.... Yes, that came quite quickly too."
"And about when do you think you will be back?"
Heinrich shook his shoulders. "I can't tell to-day, but however the thing develops, I certainly cannot leave my mother and sisters alone now."
George felt a genuine regret at being deprived of Heinrich's society in the near future. "It's possible that you won't find me in Vienna again when you come back. I shall probably go away this spring, you see." And he almost felt a desire to take Heinrich into his confidence.
"I suppose you are travelling south?" asked Heinrich.
"Yes, I think so. To enjoy my freedom once again, just for a few months. Serious life begins next autumn, you see. I am looking out for a position in Germany at some theatre or other."
"Really?"
The waiter came to the table. They paid and went.
They met Rapp and Gleissner together in the doorway. They exchanged a few words of greeting.
"And what have you been doing all this time, Herr Rapp?" asked George courteously.
Rapp took off his pince-nez. "Oh, my melancholy old job all the time. I am engaged in demonstrating the vanity of vanities."
"You might make a change, Rapp," said Heinrich. "Try your luck for once and praise the splendour of splendours."
"What is the point?" said Rapp, and put on his glasses.
"That will prove itself in the course of time. But as a rule rotten work only keeps alive during its good fortune and its fame, and when the world at last realises the swindle, it has either been in the grave for a long time or has taken refuge in its presumable immortality."
They were now in the street and all turned up their coat collars, since it had begun again to snow violently.
Gleissner, who had had his first great dramatic success a few weeks ago, quickly told them that the seventh performance of his work, which had taken place to-day, had also been sold out.
Rapp used that as a peg on which to hang malicious observations on the stupidity of the public. Gleissner answered with gibes at the impotence of the critic when confronted with true genius—and so they walked away through the snow with turned-up collar, quite enveloped in the steaming hate of their old friendship.
"That Rapp has no luck," said Heinrich to George. "He'll never forgive Gleissner for not disappointing him."
"Do you consider him so jealous?"
"I wouldn't go as far as that. Matters are rarely sufficiently simple to be disposed of in a single word. But just think what a fate it is to go about the world in the belief that you carry with you as deep a knowledge of it as Shakespeare had, and to feel at the same time that you aren't able to express as much of it as, for instance, Herr Gleissner, although perhaps one is quite as much good as he is—or even more."
They walked on together for a time in silence. The trees in the Ring were standing motionless with their white branches. It struck three from the tower of the Rathaus. They walked over the empty streets and took the way through the silent park. All around them the continuous fall of snow made everything shine almost brightly.
"By the way, I have not told you the latest news," started Heinrich suddenly, looking in front of him and speaking in a dry tone.
"What is it?"
"That I have been receiving anonymous letters for some time."
"Anonymous letters? What are the contents?"
"Oh, you can guess."
"I see." It was clear to George that it could only be something about the actress. Heinrich had returned in greater anguish than ever from the foreign town, where he had seen his mistress act the part of a depraved creature in a new play, with a truth and realism which he found positively intolerable. George knew that he and she had since then been exchanging letters full of tenderness and scorn, full of anger and forgiveness, full of broken anguish and laboured confidence.
"The delightful messages," explained Heinrich, "have been coming along every morning for eight days. Not very pleasant, I can assure you."
"Good gracious, what do they matter to you? You know yourself anonymous letters never contain the truth."
"On the contrary, my dear George, they always do, but letters like that always contain a kind of higher truth, the great truth of possibilities. Men haven't usually got sufficient imagination to create things out of nothing."
"That is a charming way of looking at things. Where should we all get to, then? It makes things a bit too easy for libellers of all kinds."
"Why do you say libellers? I regard it as highly improbable that there are any libels contained in the anonymous letters which I have been receiving. No doubt exaggerations, embellishments, inaccuracies...."
"Lies."
"No, I am sure they are not lies; some, no doubt, but in a case like this how is one to separate the truth from the lies?"
"There is a very simple way of dealing with that. You go there."
"Me go there?"
"Yes, of course that is what you ought to do. When you are on the spot you are bound to get at once to the real truth."
"It would certainly be possible."
They were walking under arcades on the wet stone. Their voices and steps echoed. George began again. "Instead of going on being demoralised with all this annoyance, I should try and convince myself personally as to how matters stood."
"Yes, that would certainly be the soundest thing to do."
"Well, why don't you do it?"
Heinrich remained stationary and jerked out with clenched teeth: "Tell me, my dear George, have you not really noticed that I am a coward?"
"Nonsense, one doesn't call that being a coward."
"Call it whatever you like. Words never hit things off exactly. The more precisely they pretend to do so the less they really do. I know what I am. I would not go there for anything in the world. To make a fool of myself once more, no, no, no...."
"Well, what will you do?"
Heinrich shook his shoulders as though the matter really did not concern him.
Somewhat irritated, George went on questioning him. "If you will allow me to make a remark, what does the ... lady chiefly concerned have to say?"
"The lady who is chiefly concerned, as you call her, with a wit, which though unconscious is positively infernal, does not know for the time being anything about my getting anonymous letters."
"Have you left off corresponding with her?"
"What an idea! We write daily to each other as we did before. She the most tender and lying letters, I the meanest you can possibly imagine—disingenuous, reserved letters, that torture me to the quick."
"Look here, Heinrich, you are really not a very noble character."
Heinrich laughed out loud. "No, I am not noble. I clearly was not born to be that."
"And when one thinks that after all these are sheer libels——" George for his part had of course no doubt that the anonymous letters contained the truth. In spite of that he was honestly desirous that Heinrich should travel to the actual spot, convince himself, do something definite, box somebody's ears or shoot somebody down. He imagined Felician in a similar position, or Stanzides or Willy Eissler. All of them would have taken it better or in a different way, one for which he certainly could have felt more sympathy. Suddenly the question ran through his brain as to what he would probably do, if Anna were to deceive him. Anna deceive him ... was that really possible? He thought of her look that evening, that dark questioning look which she had sent over to Demeter Stanzides. No, that did not signify anything, he was sure of it, and the old episodes with Leo and the singing-master, they were harmless, almost childish. But he thought of something that was different and perhaps more significant—a strange question which she had put to him the other day when she had stayed unduly late in his company and had had to hurry off home with an excuse. Was he not afraid, she had asked him, to have it on his conscience that he was making her into a liar? It had rung half like a reproach and half like a warning, and if she herself was so little sure of herself could he trust her implicitly? Did he not love her? He ... and did he not deceive her in spite of it, or was ready to do so at any moment, which, after all, came to the same thing?
Only an hour ago, in the fly, when he held her in his arms and kissed her, she had of course no idea that he had other thoughts than for her. And yet at a certain moment, with his lips on hers, he had longed for Sissy. Why should it not happen that Anna should deceive him? After all, it might have already happened ... without his having an idea of it.... But all these ideas had as it were no substance, they swept through his mind, like fantastic almost amusing possibilities. He was standing with Heinrich in front of the closed door in the Floriani Gassi and shook hands with him.
"Well, God bless you," he said; "when we see each other again I hope you will be cured of your doubts."
"And would that be much good?" asked Heinrich. "Can one reassure oneself with certainties in matters of love? The most one can do is to reassure oneself with bad news, for that lasts, but being certain of something good is at the best an intoxication.... Well, goodbye, old chap. I hope we will see each other again in May. Then, whatever happens, I shall come here for a time, and we can talk again about our glorious opera."
"Yes, if I shall be back again in Vienna in May. It may be that I shall not come back before the autumn."
"And then go off again on your new career?"
"It is quite possible that it will turn out like that," and he looked Heinrich in the face with a kind of childlike defiant smile that seemed to say: "I'm not going to tell you."
Heinrich seemed surprised. "Look here, George, perhaps this is the very last time we are standing together in front of this door. Oh, I am far from thrusting myself into your confidence. This somewhat one-sided relationship will no doubt have to go on on its present lines. Well, it doesn't matter."
George looked straight in front of him.
"I hope things go all right," said Heinrich as the door opened, "and drop me a line now and then."
"Certainly," answered George, and suddenly saw Heinrich's eyes resting upon him with an expression of real sympathy which he had never expected. "Certainly ... and you must write to me, too. At any rate give me news of how things are at home and what you are working at. At all events," he added sincerely, "we must continue to keep in touch with each other."
The porter stood there with dishevelled hair and an angry sleepy expression, in a greenish-brown dressing-gown, with slippers on his bare feet.
Heinrich shook hands with George for the last time. "Goodbye, my dear friend," he said, and then in a gentler voice, as he pointed to the porter: "I cannot keep him waiting any longer. You will find no particular difficulty in reading in his noble physiognomy, which is obviously the genuine native article, the names he is calling me to himself at this particular moment. Adieu."
George could not help laughing. Heinrich disappeared. The door clanged and closed.
George did not feel the least bit sleepy and determined to go home on foot. He was in an excited exalted mood. He was envisaging the days which were now bound to come with a peculiar sense of tension. He thought of to-morrow's meeting with Anna, the things they were going to talk over, the journey, the house that already stood somewhere in the world, which his imagination had already roughly pictured like a house out of a box of toys, light-green with a bright red roof and a black chimney. His own form appeared before him like a picture thrown on a white screen by a magic lantern: he saw himself sitting on a balcony in happy solitude, in front of a table strewn with music paper. Branches rocked in front of the railings. A clear sky hung above him, while below at his feet lay the sea, with a dreamy blueness that was quite abnormal.
[1]A reference to the Faro game.
[1]A reference to the Faro game.
George gently opened the door of Anna's room. She still lay asleep in bed and breathed deeply and peacefully. He went out of the slightly darkened room, back again into his own and shut the door. Then he went to the open window and looked out. Clouds bathed in sunshine were sweeping over the water. The mountains opposite with their clearly-defined lines were floating in the brilliancy of the heavens, while the brightest blue was glittering over the gardens and houses of Lugano.
George was quite delighted to breathe in once more the air of this June morning, which brought to him the moist freshness of the lake and the perfume of the plane-trees, magnolias and roses in the hotel park; to look out upon this view, whose spring-like peace had welcomed him like a fresh happiness every morning for the last three weeks.
He drank his tea quickly, ran down the stairs as quickly and expectantly as he had once, when a boy, hurried off to his play, and took his accustomed way along the bank in the grey fragrance of the early shade. Here he would think of his own lonely morning walks at Palermo and Taormina in the previous spring, walks which he had frequently continued for hours on end, since Grace was very fond of lying in bed with open eyes until noon.
That period of his life, over which a recent though no doubt much-desired farewell seemed to squat like a sinister cloud, usually struck him as more or less bathed in melancholy. But this time all painful things seemed to lie in the far distance, and at any rate he had it in his power to put off the end as long as he wanted, if it did not come from fate itself.
He had left Vienna with Anna at the beginning of March, as it was no longer possible to conceal her condition. In January, in fact, George had decided to speak to her mother. He had more or less prepared himself for it, and was consequently able to make his communication quietly and in well-turned phraseology. The mother listened in silence and her eyes grew large and moist. Anna sat on the sofa with an embarrassed smile and looked at George as he spoke, with a kind of curiosity. They sketched out the plan for the ensuing months. George wanted to stay abroad with Anna until the early summer. Then a house was to be taken in the country in the neighbourhood of Vienna, so that her mother should not be far away in the time of greatest need, and the child could without difficulty be given out to nurse in the neighbourhood of the town. They also thought out an excuse for officious inquisitive people for Anna's departure and absence.
As her voice had made substantial progress of late—which was perfectly true—she had gone off to a celebrated singing mistress in Dresden, to complete her training.
Frau Rosner nodded several times, as though she agreed with everything, but the features of her face became sadder and sadder. It was not so much that she was oppressed by what she had just learnt, as she was by the realisation that she was bound to be so absolutely defenceless, poor middle-class mother that she was, sitting opposite the aristocratic seducer.
George, who noticed this with regret, endeavoured to assume a lighter and more sympathetic tone. He came closer to the good woman, he took her hand and held it for some seconds in his own. Anna had scarcely contributed a word to the whole discussion, but when George got ready to go she got up, and for the first time in front of her mother she offered him her lips to kiss, as though she were now celebrating her betrothal to him.
George went downstairs in better spirits, as though the worst were now really over. Henceforth he spent whole hours at the Rosners' more frequently than before, practising music with Anna, whose voice had now grown noticeably in power and volume. The mother's demeanour to George became more friendly. Why, it often seemed to him as though she had to be on her guard against a growing sympathy for him, and there was one evening in the family circle when George stayed for supper, improvised afterwards to the company from the Meistersingers and Lohengrin with his cigar in his mouth, could not help enjoying the lively applause, particularly from Josef, and was almost shocked to notice as he went home that he had felt quite as comfortable, as though it had been a home he had recently won for himself.
When he was sitting over his black coffee with Felician a few days later the servant brought in a card, the receipt of which made a slight blush mount to his cheek. Felician pretended not to notice his brother's embarrassment, said good-bye and left the room. He met old Rosner in the doorway, inclined his head slightly in answer to his greeting and took no further notice.
George invited Herr Rosner, who came in in his winter coat with his hat and umbrella, to sit down, and offered him a cigar. Old Rosner said: "I have just been smoking," a remark which somehow or other reassured George, and sat down, while George remained leaning on the table.
Then the old man began with his accustomed slowness: "You will probably be able to imagine, Herr Baron, why I have taken the liberty of troubling you. I really wanted to speak to you in the earlier part of the day, but unfortunately I could not get away from the office."
"You would not have found me at home in the morning, Herr Rosner," answered George courteously.
"All the better then that I didn't have my journey for nothing. My wife has told me this morning ... what has happened...." He looked at the floor.
"Yes," said George, and gnawed at his upper lip. "I myself intended.... But won't you take off your overcoat? It is very warm in the room."
"No thank you, thank you, it is not at all too warm for me. Well, I was horrified when my wife gave me this information. Indeed I was, Herr Baron.... I never would have thought it of Anna ... never thought it possible ... it is ... really dreadful...." He spoke all the time in his usual monotonous voice, though he shook his head more often than usual.
George could not help looking all the time at his head with its thin yellow-grey hair, and felt nothing but a desolate boredom. "Really, Herr Rosner, the thing is not dreadful," he said at last. "If you knew how much I ... and how sincere my affection for Anna is, you would certainly be very far from thinking the thing dreadful. At any rate, I suppose your wife has told you about our plans for the immediate future ... or am I making a mistake...?"
"Not at all, Herr Baron, I have been informed of everything this morning. But I must say that I have noticed for some weeks that something was wrong in the house. It often struck me that my wife was very nervous and was often on the point of crying."
"On the point of crying! There is really no occasion for that, Herr Rosner. Anna herself, who is more concerned than any one else, is very well and is in her usual good spirits...."
"Yes, Anna at any rate takes it very well, and that, to speak frankly, is more or less my consolation. But I cannot describe to you, Baron, how hard hit ... how, I could almost say ... like a bolt from the blue ... I could never, no, never have ... have believed it...." He could not say any more. His voice trembled.
"I am really very concerned," said George, "that you should take the matter like this, in spite of the fact that your wife is bound to have explained everything to you, and that the measures we have taken for the near future presumably meet with your approval. I would prefer not to talk about a time which is further, though I hope not too far off, because phrases of all kinds are more or less distasteful to me, but you may be sure, Herr Rosner, that I certainly shall not forget what I owe to a person like Anna.... Yes, what I owe to myself." He gulped.
In all his memory there was no moment in his life in which he had felt less sympathy for himself. And now, as is necessarily the case in all pointless conversations, they repeated themselves several times, until Herr Rosner finally apologised for having troubled him, and took his leave of George, who accompanied him to the stairs.
George felt an unpleasant aftermath in his soul for some days after this visit. The brother would be the finishing touch, he thought irritably, and he could not help imagining a scene of explanation in the course of which the young man would endeavour to play the avenger of the family honour, while George put him in his place with extraordinarily trenchant expressions.
George nevertheless felt a sense of relief after the conversation with Anna's parents had taken place, and the hours which he spent with his beloved alone in the peaceful room opposite the church were full of a peculiar feeling of comfort and safety. It sometimes seemed to them both as though time stood still.
It was all very well for George to bring guide-books, Burckhardt'sCicerone, and even maps to their meetings, and to plan out with Anna all kinds of routes; he did not as a matter of fact seriously think that all this would ever be realised.
So far, however, as the house in which the child was to be born was concerned, they were both impressed with the necessity of its being found and taken before they left Vienna. Anna once saw an advertisement in the paper which she was accustomed to read carefully for that very object, of a lodge near the forest, and not far from a railway station, which could be reached in one and a half hours from Vienna. One morning they both took the train to the place in question and they had a memory of a snow-covered lonely wooden building with antlers over the door, an old drunken keeper, a young blonde girl, a swift sleigh-ride over a snowy winter street, an extraordinarily jolly dinner in an enormous room in the inn, and then home in a badly-lighted over-heated compartment. This was the only time that George tried to find with Anna the house that must be standing somewhere in the world and waiting to be decided upon. Otherwise he usually went alone by train or tramway to look round the summer resorts which were near Vienna. Once, on a spring day that had come straight into the middle of the winter, George was walking through one of the small places situated quite near town, which he was particularly fond of, where village buildings, unassuming villas and elegant country houses lay close upon each other. He had completely forgotten, as often happened, why he had taken the journey, and was thinking with emotion of the fact that Beethoven and Schubert had taken the same walk as he, many years ago, when he unexpectedly ran up against Nürnberger. They greeted each other, praised the fine day, which had enticed them so far out into the open, and expressed regret that they so rarely saw each other since Bermann had left Vienna.
"Is it long since you heard anything of him?" asked George.
"I have only had a card from him," replied Nürnberger, "since he left. It is much more likely he would correspond regularly with you than with me."
"Why is it more likely?" inquired George, somewhat irritated by Nürnberger's tone, as indeed be frequently was.
"Well, at any rate you have the advantage over me of being a new acquaintance, and consequently offering more exciting subject-matter for his psychological interest than I can."
George detected in the accustomed flippancy of these words a certain sense of grievance which he more or less understood, for, as a matter of fact, Heinrich had bothered very little about Nürnberger of late, though he had previously seen a great deal of him, it being always his way to draw men to him and then drop them with the greatest lack of consideration, according as their character did or did not fit in with his own mood.
"In spite of that I am not much better off than you," said George. "I haven't had any news of him for some weeks either. His father, too, appears to be in a bad way according to the last letter."
"So I suppose it will soon be all up with the poor old man now."
"Who knows? According to what Bermann writes me, he can still last for months."
Nürnberger shook his head seriously.
"Yes," said George lightly. "The doctors ought to be allowed in cases like that ... to shorten the matter."
"You are perhaps right," answered Nürnberger, "but who knows whether our friend Heinrich, however much the sight of his father's incurable malady may put him off his work and perhaps many other things as well—who knows whether he might not all the same refuse the suggestion of finishing off this hopeless matter by a morphia injection?"
George felt again repulsed by Nürnberger's bitter, ironic tone, and yet when he remembered the hour when he had seen Heinrich more violently upset by a few obscure words in the letter of a mistress than by his father's madness, he could not drive out the impression that Nürnberger's opinion of their friend was correct. "Did you know old Bermann?" he asked.
"Not personally, but I still remember the time when his name was known in the papers, and I remember, too, many extremely sound and excellent speeches which he made in Parliament. But I am keeping you, my dear Baron. Goodbye. We will see each other no doubt one of these days in the café, or at Ehrenbergs'."
"You are not keeping me at all," replied George with deliberate courtesy. "I am quite at large, and I am availing myself of the opportunity of looking at houses for the summer."
"So you are going in the country, near Vienna this year?"
"Yes, for a time probably, and apart from that a family I know has asked me if I should chance to run across...." He grew a little red, as he always did when he was not adhering strictly to the truth. Nürnberger noticed it and said innocently: "I have just passed by some villas which are to let. Do you see, for instance, that white one with the white terrace?"
"It looks very nice. We might have a look at it, if you won't find it too dull coming with me. Then we can go back together to town."
The garden which they entered sloped upwards and was very long and narrow. It reminded Nürnberger of one in which he had played as a child. "Perhaps it is the same," he said. "We lived for years and years you know in the country in Grinzing or Heiligenstadt."
This "we" affected George in quite a strange way. He could scarcely realise Nürnberger's ever having been quite young, ever having lived as a son with his father and mother, as a brother with his sisters, and he felt all of a sudden that this man's whole life had something strange and hard about it.
At the top of the garden an open arbour gave a wonderfully fine view of the town, which they enjoyed for some time. They slowly went down, accompanied by the caretaker's wife, who carried a small child wrapped in a grey shawl in her arms. They then looked at the house—low musty rooms with cheap battered carpets on the floor, narrow wooden beds, dull or broken mirrors.
"Everything will be done up again in the spring," explained the caretaker, "then it will look very cheerful." The little child suddenly held out its tiny hand towards George, as if it wanted him to take it up in his arms. George was somewhat moved and smiled awkwardly.
As he rode with Nürnberger into the town on the platform of the tramway and chatted to him he felt that he had never got so close to him on all the many previous occasions when they had been together, as during this hour of clear winter sunshine in the country. When they said goodbye it was quite a matter of course that they should arrange a new excursion on a day in the immediate future. And so it came about that George was several times accompanied by Nürnberger, when he continued his househunting in the neighbourhood of Vienna. On these occasions the fiction was still kept up that George was looking for a house for a family whom he knew, that Nürnberger believed it and that George believed that Nürnberger believed it.
On these excursions Nürnberger frequently came to speak of his youth, to speak about the parents whom he had lost very early, of a sister who had died young and of his elder brother, the only one of his relatives who was still alive. But he, an ageing bachelor like Edmund himself, did not live in Vienna, but in a small town in Lower Austria, where he was a teacher in a public school, where he had been transferred fifteen years ago as an assistant. He could easily have managed afterwards to have got an appointment again in the metropolis, but after a few years of bitterness, and even defiance, he had become so completely acclimatised to the quiet petty life of the place where he was staying that he came to regard a return to Vienna as more a sacrifice than anything else, and he now lived on, passionately devoted to his profession and particularly to his studies in philology, far from the world, lonely, contented, a kind of philosopher in the little town. When Nürnberger spoke of this distant brother George often felt as though he were hearing him speak about some one who had died, so absolutely out of the question seemed every possibility of a permanent reunion in the future. It was in quite a different tone, almost as though he were speaking of a being who could return once again, that he would talk with a perpetual wistfulness of the sister who had been dead several years. It was on a misty February day, while they were at the railway station waiting for the train to Vienna, and walking up and down with each other on the platform, that Nürnberger told George the story of this sister, who when a child of sixteen had become possessed as it were by a tremendous passion for the theatre, and had run away from home without saying goodbye in a fit of childish romanticism. She had wandered from town to town, from stage to stage, for ten years, playing smaller and smaller parts, since neither her talent nor her beauty appeared to be sufficient for the career which she had chosen, but always with the same enthusiasm, always with the same confidence in her future, in spite of the disillusions which she experienced and the sorrow which she saw. In the holidays she would come to the brothers, who were still living together, sometimes for weeks, sometimes only for days, and tell them about the provincial halls in which she had acted as though they were great theatres; about her few successes as though they were triumphs which she had won, about the wretched comedians at whose side she worked as though they were great artists, tell them about the petty intrigues that took place around her as though they were powerful tragedies of passion. And instead of gradually realising the miserable world in which she was living a life which was as much to be pitied as that of any one else, she spun every year the essence of her soul into more and more golden dreams. This went on for a long time, until at last she came home, feverish and ill. She lay in bed for months on end with flushed cheeks, raving in her delirium of a fame and happiness which she had never experienced, got up once again in apparent health, and went away once more, only to come back home, this time after a few weeks, in complete collapse with death written on her forehead. Her brother now travelled with her to the South; to Arco, Meran, to the Italian Lakes, and it was only as she lay stretched out in southern gardens beneath flowering trees, far away from the whirl that had dazed and intoxicated her throughout the years that she realised at last that her life had been simply a racketing about beneath a painted sky and between paper walls—that the whole essence of her existence had been an illusion. But even the little everyday incidents, the apartments and inns of the foreign town, seemed to her memory simply scenes which she had played in as an actress by the footlights, and not scenes which she had really lived, and as she approached nearer and nearer to the grave, there awoke within her an awful yearning for that real life which she had missed, and the more surely she knew that it was lost to her for ever, the clearer became the gaze with which she realised the fullness of the world. And the strangest touch of all was the way in which, in the last weeks of her life, that talent to which she had sacrificed her whole existence without ever really possessing it manifested itself with diabolic uncanniness.
"It seems to me, even to-day," said Nürnberger, "that I have never heard verses so declaimed, never seen whole scenes so acted, even by the greatest actress, as I did by my sister in the hotel room at Cadenabbia, looking out on to the Lake of Como, a few days before she died. Of course," he added, "it is possible, even probable, that my memory is deceiving me."
"But why?" asked George, who was so pleased with thisfinalethat he did not want to have it spoiled. And he endeavoured to convince Nürnberger, who listened to him with a smile, that he could not have made a mistake, and that the world had lost a great actress in that strange girl who lay buried in Cadenabbia.
George did not find on his excursions with Nürnberger the house in the country for which he was looking. In fact it seemed to become more difficult to find every time he went out. Nürnberger made occasional jokes about George's exacting requirements. He seemed to be looking for a villa which was to be faced in front by a well-kept road, while it was to have at the back a garden door which led into the natural forest. Eventually George himself did not seriously believe that he would now succeed in finding the desired house, and relied on the pressure of necessity after his return from his travels.
It seemed more essential to get as soon as possible into touch with a doctor, but George put this off too from one day to another. But one evening Anna informed him that she had been suddenly panic-stricken by a new attack of faintness, had visited Doctor Stauber and explained her condition to him. He had been very nice, had not expressed any astonishment, had thoroughly reassured her and only expressed the wish to speak to George before they went away.
A few days afterwards George went to see the doctor in accordance with his invitation.
The consultation hours were over. Doctor Stauber received him with the friendliness which he had anticipated, seemed to treat the whole matter as being as regular and as much a matter of course as it could possibly be, and spoke of Anna just as though she had been a young wife, a method of procedure which affected George in a strange but not unpleasant way.
When the practical discussion was over the doctor inquired about the destination of their journey. George had not yet mapped out any programme, only this much was decided, that the spring was to be spent in the south, probably in Italy. Doctor Stauber took the opportunity to talk about his last stay in Rome, which was ten years back. He had been in personal touch on this occasion, as he had been once before, with the director of the excavations and spoke to George in almost ecstatic terms of the latest discoveries on the Palatine, about which he had written monographs as a young man, which he had published in the antiquarian journals. He then showed George, and not without pride, his library, which was divided into two sections, medicine and the history of art, and took out and offered to lend him a few rare books, one printed in the year 1834 on the Vatican collections and also a history of Sicily. George felt highly excited as he realised with such vividness the rich days that lay in front of him. He was overcome by a kind of homesickness for places which he knew well and had missed for a long time. Half-forgotten pictures floated up in his memory, the pyramids of Cestius stood on the horizon in sharp outlines, as they had appeared to him when he had ridden back as a boy into the town at evening with the prince of Macedon; the dim church, where he had seen his first mistress step up to the altar as a bride, opened its doors; a bark under a dark sky with strange sulphur yellow sails drew near to the coast.... He began to speak about the several towns and landscapes of the south which he had seen as a boy and as a youth, explained the longing for those places which often seized on him like a genuine homesickness, his joy at being able to take in with mature appreciation all the differing things which he had longed for, reserved for himself and then forgotten, and many new things besides, and this time too in the society of a being who was able to appreciate and enjoy everything with him, and whom he held dear.
Doctor Stauber, who was in the act of putting a book back on the shelf, turned round suddenly to George, looked gently at him and said: "I am very glad of that." As George answered his look with some surprise he added: "It was the first tender allusion to your relationship to Annerl that I have noticed in the course of the last hour. I know, I know that you are not the kind of man to take a comparative stranger into your confidence, but if only because I had no reason to expect it, it has really done me good. It came straight from your heart, one could see it; and I should have been really sorry for Annerl—excuse me, I always call her that—if I had been driven to think that you are not as fond of her as she deserves."
"I really don't know," replied George coolly, "what gave you cause to doubt it, doctor."
"Did I say anything about doubts?" replied Stauber good-humouredly. "But, after all, it has happened before that a young man who has had all kinds of experiences does not appreciate a sacrifice of this kind sufficiently, for it still is a sacrifice, my dear Baron. We can be as superior to all prejudices as much as we like—but it is not a trifle even to-day for a young girl of good family to make up her mind to do a thing like that, and I won't conceal it from you—of course I did not let Annerl notice anything—it gave even me a slight shock when she came to me the other day and told me all about it."
"Excuse me, Herr Doctor," replied George, irritated but yet polite, "if it gave you a shock that is surely some proof against your being superior to prejudices...."
"You are right," said Stauber with a smile, "but perhaps you will overlook this lapse when you consider that I am somewhat older than you and belong to another age. Even a more or less independent man ... which I flatter myself I am ... cannot quite escape from the influence of his age. It is a strange thing, but believe me, even among the young people, who have grown up on Nietzsche and Ibsen, there are quite as many Philistines as there were thirty years ago. They won't own up to it, but it does go against the grain with them, for instance, if some one goes and seduces their sister, or if one of their worthy wives suddenly takes it into her head that she wants to live her own life.... Many, of course, are consistent and carry their pose through ... but that is more a matter of self-control than of their real views, and in the old days, you know, the age to which I belong, when ideas were so immovably hide-bound, when every one for instance was quite sure of things like this: one has to honour one's parents or else one is a knave ... or ... one only loves really once in one's life ... or it's a pleasure to die for one's fatherland ... in that time, mind you, when every decent man held up some flag or other, or at any rate had something written on his banner ... believe me, the so-called modern ideas had more adherents than you suspect. The only thing was that those adherents did not quite know it themselves, they did not trust their own ideas, they thought themselves, as it were, debauchees or even criminals. Shall I tell you something, Herr Baron? There are really no new ideas at all. People feel with a new intensity—that's what it is. But do you seriously think that Nietzsche discovered the superman, Ibsen the fraud of life and Anzengruber the truth that the parents who desire love and honour from their children ought to 'come up to the scratch' themselves? Not a bit of it. All the ethical ideas have always been there, and one would really be surprised if one knew what absolute blockheads have thought of the so-called great new truths, and have even frequently given them expression long before the geniuses to whom we owe these truths, or rather the courage to regard these truths as true. If I have gone rather too far forgive me. I really only wanted to say ... and you will believe me, I am sure.... I know as well as you, Baron, that there is many a virgin girl who is a thousand times more corrupt than a so-called fallen woman; and that there is many a young man who passes for respectable who has worse things on his conscience than starting aliaisonwith an innocent girl. And yet ... it is just the curse of my period ..." he interpolated with a smile, "I could not help it, the first moment Annerl told me her story certain unpleasant words which in their day had their own fixed meaning began to echo through my old head in their old tones, silly out-of-date words like ... libertine ... seduction ... leaving in the lurch ... and so on, and that is why I must ask you once more to forgive me, now that I have got to know you somewhat more intimately ... that is why I felt that shock which a modern man would certainly not own that he experienced. But to talk seriously once again, just consider a minute how your poor father, who did not know Anna, would have taken the matter. He was certainly one of the shrewdest and most unprejudiced men whom one can imagine ... and all the same you have not the slightest doubt that the matter would not have passed off without his feeling something of a shock as well."
George could not help holding out his hand to the doctor. The unexpectedness of this sudden allusion caused so intense a longing to spring up within him that the only thing he could do to assuage it was to begin to talk of him who had passed away. The doctor was able to tell him of many meetings with the late baron, mostly chance casual encounters in the street, at the sessions of the scientific academy, at concerts. There came another of those moments in which George thought himself strangely guilty in his attitude towards the dead man and registered a mental vow to become worthy of his memory.